Johnny Lee '01 (Violinist, Los Angeles Philharmonic)
by D. Dona Le
At the age of 5, Cleveland native Johnny Lee AB ’01 jumped at the chance to begin playing the violin so he could emulate his older twin brothers (photo to the right by Craig Mathew/Mathew Imaging, courtesy of the LA Philharmonic).
“I wanted to play violin from the onset. My brothers didn’t. They do other things now,” Lee laughs, “and I stuck with it—but it was kind of a convoluted journey to it.”
That journey included the Cleveland Institute of Music (the pre-college and graduate-level programs), Harvard College in between, several orchestras and numerous music festivals, and then—since 2005—a coveted job with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Lee enrolled in the prestigious Cleveland Institute of Music’s Preparatory Program just two years after beginning to play the violin. But even though music was a significant part of his childhood, more than an afterschool activity or passing hobby, Lee’s parents never expected him to pursue a full-fledged career as a violinist. In fact, Lee’s father, a physician, hoped that all three of his sons would follow his footsteps to medicine.
“So that was the path. I was so set on doing ‘the right thing’ and being a doctor, I applied to Harvard and I got in early,” he says. “But it was when I was at Harvard that I decided, I have to play violin. I have to try.”
But Lee took a few detours before arriving at that decision. As a freshman, he was a pre-med student and spent the next summer doing an internship at Harvard Medical School. Quickly realizing that he had little interest in biology, Lee switched his concentration to Economics and completed a summer internship at Fidelity Investments before junior year.
“Then I realized I didn’t like economics or business,” Lee confesses. “I had told my parents, if I didn’t want to be a doctor, I could do finance or law. But in the back of my mind, I always knew that I would have to do music.”
In fact, Lee was already doing music pretty much full-time on campus. He was the concertmaster for the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra as a junior and senior, an experience he recalls fondly. “HRO is the best. It’s the big orchestra, and you go on tours and retreats. I’m so glad I did it, and it was such a big part of my experience.”
Lee also co-founded the Brattle Street Chamber Players, Harvard’s conductor-less chamber group, and he frequently took Music 93r and Music 180, the College’s chamber music performance courses.
“All I was doing in my free time was practicing, playing chamber music, and being in HRO. That was my entire social life, and I was enjoying it much more than what I was studying.”
But breaking the news to his parents would be a challenge. When they visited Harvard to attend his solo performance with a student orchestra, Lee took the opportunity to announce his career change. He promised to complete his economics degree, but was simultaneously preparing to apply for summer festivals and music graduate schools. Although Lee’s mother had attended music school in Korea, she and his father were deeply worried about the feasibility and stability of a working musician’s life.
But Lee remained dedicated to the violin, and his swift trajectory from Harvard to the L.A. Phil reflects that dedication, not to mention his tenacity and talent. After graduating cum laude in 2001, Lee returned to his hometown in Ohio to study with William Preucil at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
His first job right after earning his master’s degree was with the Charlotte Symphony, where he won the position of assistant concertmaster. The demand among classical musicians for orchestra jobs far outweighs their availability, and many talented musicians embark on a long, grueling audition process before winning their first job. But the Charlotte Symphony was only Lee’s sixth audition; a couple of years later, the L.A. Phil audition was only his tenth.
After winning the Charlotte audition, “[m]y parents were proud of me, but they were still worried,” Lee admits. “But I was so happy to have a job because the audition process is so cruel.”
Joining the Charlotte Symphony proved to be a valuable experience for Lee offstage as well. The orchestra went on strike shortly after he moved to North Carolina, which was “incredibly eye-opening” for Lee. After two months, the orchestra returned to work, where Lee learned a lot about performing in a leadership capacity as assistant and acting associate concertmaster. Lee recalls, “I had a great time just living on my own for the first time. I made it a point to think, ‘Just focus on your job, and don’t worry about taking auditions for a while.’”
But the Charlotte Symphony was not a 52-week orchestra (like the L.A. Phil), so Lee began to take auditions for summer gigs. He won a position with Chicago’s Grant Park Orchestra in 2005 before learning about an opening for a second violinist at the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
“I didn’t have any expectations at all,” says Lee. “I thought, ‘I’ll just go there, play one round, get cut, and then go surprise my parents,’ who were moving to Palm Springs at the time. I wasn’t even going to tell them about it because they worry too much.”
Approximately fifty violinists showed up for the preliminary round in a process designed to be as meritocratic as possible. The musicians draw numbers to select their audition time, and the first several rounds are blind auditions.
“You’re just playing for a screen. They even have a carpet for the stage so they can’t tell if you’re wearing high heels. [The audition process] isn’t perfect—it’s a miserable experience,” Lee concedes, “but it has to be as fair as possible.”
The required excerpts for this particular audition included the first movements of a Romantic and Mozart concerto, plus twenty orchestral excerpts. The preparation done for this preliminary round is time-consuming and extensive; musicians from around the world fly to Los Angeles with the hope of advancing to the next round, but most are cut off after just a few excerpts and eliminated.
When Lee advanced to the second round, he decided to tell his parents that he was in town for the auditions. After all, “my Palm Springs trip was out the window.” By the final round, which took place three days after the first round, the selection committee had narrowed the audition pool to just six violinists.
“The first round [that day] was still behind the screen, the judges deliberated, and then they whittled us down to three,” Lee recalls. “At this point, for this particular orchestra, they took down the screen because they want to see how you play and how you interact with the conductor and other musicians. By now, I had played every excerpt and I had also performed my concerto movements with a pianist.”
The last portion of the final round was to be a chamber music reading with principal members of the L.A. Phil string section. Lee was reviewing the violin parts for the chamber music scores he’d just been given, when he heard a knock on his dressing room door. It was the Philharmonic’s personnel manager, who asked that Lee re-join him and the selection committee in the auditorium.
“I could hear the other two violinists practicing their chamber music excerpts in their rooms, so I thought, ‘Oh no, it’s over,’” he recounts. “I went onstage, and they were clearing it—I thought they were clearing it for the chamber music round.”
But the stage was being cleared because the committee had already selected the L.A. Phil’s newest member to the second violin section: Johnny Lee.
“I was in total shock. This changes your life,” he says even now, ten years later. “I played at an L.A. Phil event yesterday with two of my colleagues, and one of them said the same thing. It really changes your life.”
And immediately, too. The L.A. Phil was prepared for Lee to join the orchestra on its summer tour to New York the next day, but Lee had to return to Charlotte to pack up his belongings and then spend the summer in Chicago with the Grant Park Orchestra.
At Lee’s level, the classical music world is small and insular; news, especially the news of an unusually young violinist winning a job with one of the most prestigious symphony orchestras, travels fast.
On Lee’s very first day with Grant Park, conductor Carlos Kalmar quipped, “So nice to meet you. I hear you’re leaving us.”
In August 2005, Lee moved to Los Angeles and has settled in very happily.
“I’m here for good,” he says confidently. “I love Los Angeles, and most of my family lives in Southern California. My parents are so happy, they’re delighted it all worked out and we all live in the same area. And I love the L.A. Phil. Musically and managerially, it’s such a great organization with a great hall and great audiences.
“Los Angeles is so big in every sense,” Lee continues. “I hate when people say, ‘It’s not like New York.’ Los Angeles is so big, you can pretty much find anything here that you would find in New York. You just have to know where to look.”
In addition to the Philharmonic, Lee keeps himself musically engaged here in Los Angeles and elsewhere. He’s been a regular performer with Ensemble Ditto, a chamber music group from South Korea, and he has performed as a featured soloist with the Ohio Chamber Orchestra and the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, in addition to the L.A. Phil and other local orchestras.
The L.A. Phil’s rehearsal schedule keeps him busy. A typical workweek during the Disney Hall season, happening now, consists of: Mondays off, Tuesday morning rehearsal, Wednesday all-day rehearsal, and then Thursday morning dress rehearsal, followed by four concerts Thursday through Sunday. Repeat the following week, with a new program.
The Hollywood Bowl summer schedule moves at an even more breakneck pace, with the orchestra sometimes rehearsing only once the morning of the performance, as there are up to three different programs a week. More often than not, the Bowl concerts feature pieces that the musicians know well from past seasons.
Despite the inevitable repetition of repertoire throughout the lifetime tenure of any symphony musician, Lee sounds just as excited about every concert as he was ten years ago.
“I don’t get sick of pieces, to be honest with you. There are different conductors who will bring different perspectives to the music. And if anything, I remember parts that were challenging the first time around and I psych myself up for those parts.”
Lee also speaks enthusiastically about the many initiatives the L.A. Phil has taken to engage its existing audience and to attract new supporters, such as the Casual Fridays concert series and CODA Concerts.
According to Lee, to counter the doomsayers who claim that classical music is dying, “it’s increasingly important to constantly be creative, and the L.A. Phil is doing so many great things. We perform a lot of new music, which is appealing to younger audiences. That’s what I like about Los Angeles. There’s no snob factor about attending the concerts."
Another example of the Philharmonic’s innovation is the summer concert series featuring full-length movies with soundtracks performed live by the orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl.
“My definite all-time favorite of that kind of concert was when we played West Side Story with the film playing above us. That score is amazing.”
In his journey from the historic Sanders Theatre to the renowned Walt Disney Concert Hall, Lee has never regretted not attending a music conservatory instead of Harvard. In fact, the L.A. Phil has an unusually high number of Harvard-affiliated musicians (four, including Lee).
Though Harvard doesn’t offer a music performance degree, Lee credits the College with providing the environment “where I actually learned to love music by playing so much chamber music and hanging out with people who had so many other interests, so many other possibilities that they could do for a living, but they decided to choose music. Harvard was definitely the pinnacle of my love for music—obviously I still love music—but at that moment in college, the world is so open and filled with possibilities.”